When a Voting Problem Becomes a Money Problem

Much is made about the curious habit of people in places like Kansas and Wisconsin who turn out to vote for those whose politics and policies are guaranteed to make the lives of these same voters worse than they are already. But, as an electoral strategy, this concern has proven to be something of a lemon. Nobody yet has found an effective way to translate this argument into a palatable pitch. Sooner or later, you end up implying that the voters in question are morons, and, regardless of how self-evident that fact may be, it never really sells out there on the stump. And, also, even if you could sell it, many voters are convinced that their votes—even the ones they get off their asses to cast—don't matter anyway, so there's been a fundamental cognitive dissonance baked into the very act of voting.

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But here's the one that baffles me. More often than you might think, state governments have to defend these policies in the state and federal courts and, when the state governments inevitably lose, because the policies are nakedly unconstitutional and the legal defense of them arrant bafflegab, the taxpayers of the state have to pick up the tab for all those lovely billable hours. Now there ought not to be any cognitive gap on this question—the policies that you advocated by voting for the people who promulgated them now have gone directly into your pocket. Fire all the swine!

The governor moved to cancel the organization's contract—worth about $4,453 in FY 2013 and 2014—in August after videos surfaced alleging that Planned Parenthood sold fetuses and fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood, which says the videos were deceptively edited, said a handful of affiliates engaged in a fetal tissue donation program and that organization never sold fetal parts. Planned Parenthood Southeast never participated in the program, and Planned Parenthood has ended it. The draft agreement, which still needs approval from U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson, says that Medicaid restored PPSE's contract after Thompson ruled against Bentley last month. Planned Parenthood Southeast says in the agreement it does not participate in any fetal tissue donation programs or sell fetal tissue, and will abide by Alabama laws on the subject. "Had the governor checked beforehand, he would have known that," said Randall Marshall, an attorney with the ACLU who represented Planned Parenthood Southeast in its lawsuit. Bentley said at a press conference Monday afternoon he did not attempt to consult PPSE before pulling their contract. But he said he believed Alabama's actions, along with those of other states, forced Planned Parenthood to end the program. "It was a win," the governor said. "Headlines may not show it was a win, but it was a win. When you can get an organization like Planned Parenthood that was doing such despicable things as selling body parts—regardless of how you feel about abortion, and whether you think abortion should be legal or not, selling body parts and doing an abortion to harvest body parts is a despicable act."

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(Yes, it is here that we note that PP does nothing of the sort, that the videos are tricked-up lies that now carry a body count, and that Ron Fournier needs to go lie down in a dark and quiet place for the balance of the campaign.)

What Bentley means here, of course, is that he gets a "win" because all that sweet evangelical cash from all those sweet suckers in the piney-woods prayer shacks will continue to bankroll his campaigns, and they will all turn out to vote for him the next time he runs. The state legislature of Alabama, and the state's governor, just bungled away almost $52,000 in taxpayer money on a case that they damned sure should have known was 90 percent hopeless.

(Is Bentley a big "tort reform" guy? What do you think? He's also yet another wingnut physician. I've lost count of them at this point.)

The story I go back to always on this kind of thing is the story of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board. A creationist majority on that board tried to sneak their theocratic non-science into the district's biology textbooks. A major controversy erupted. It became national news. Ultimately, the case went to federal court. The school district lost, and it was forced to fork over $1 million to cover the plaintiff's legal fees. At least, midway through the trial, the voters of the school district gave the boot to the incumbents who'd started the whole mess in the first place.

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